Greased Then Released

Without being too exact, I can tell you that Kombat and Torture Tomb shared at least 2 members at the time of releasing this split, and the 2 songs from each side show them sharing a philosophy too, of brutish underground death metal. You’d be forgiven for reading the song titles and wondering if jokes will be in order, but rest assured that none of the vocals come through clear enough to know the lyrics, while the grimy soup of sound offers no chance of a chuckle. Instead, I’d guess a nipple belt has more to do with torture than actual nipple-specific stuff.

Of the sides, Kombat’s feels much less precise, awash with overspilling noise from the powerful guitars and echoing drums, which the cavernous vocals exacerbate. Their songs move at a slow shift punctuated by brief raids into blasting territory where the music loosens up and grooves a bit, as is sadly the state of ‘Conceived in a Dumpster’ when it suffers a very quick fade-out at the end. I find more to like on Torture Tomb’s tracks, since the up-tempo riffing clatters along comfortably in a division between European and American influences, once or twice dropping in black metal sections, such as at the beginning of ‘Unknown Stench’, and also using lead guitar to blitz through a similarly cavernous sound as Kombat.

For all that the artists show slight differences, it would hardly surprise me if these guys had met at a studio one day as Kombat and then reconvened the next day in the same place as Torture Tomb. If you like one, you’ll probably like the other, but you’ll need an intrinsic appreciation of rough underground death metal to like the whole thing more than a little.